


you may end up wanting more from this life

by tosca1390



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-25
Updated: 2011-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-26 13:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is cold where it was once warm, and Jane is at a loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you may end up wanting more from this life

*

“Jane.”

“Not yet,” she whispers, eyes fixed on the sky. There’s sand and dirt in every crevice of her open skin and the folds of her jacket. The tips of her fingers are cold. The clouds are dark and thick, but there is no sense of urgency, no thick spark of energy in the air. Everything is cold where it was once warm, and Jane is at a loss.

“It’s getting dark,” Darcy mutters from behind her.

Jane waits, her gaze on the orange-purple sunset. _A deal is a deal_ , she thinks to herself.

“Jane,” Eric repeats, his hand hovering near her elbow. “We should go.”

There are cars rumbling towards them, the sound echoing hollowly in her ears. She can still smell the ozone in the air, the scorched earth; it’s harsh in her nose, but it reminds her of a promise.

“We either go now, or Coulson will make us,” Eric says near her ear.

She blinks and looks back. Darcy, surprisingly, looks cool and collected, as if she hadn’t just dealt with gods and warriors and fire-breathing metal men and an energy bridge to another dimension. With her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, Darcy squints at her. “He knows where to find you. He’ll sniff out the coffee,” the younger woman says with a small smile.

Eric’s hand curls at Jane’s elbow. “Let’s go,” he says.

They pull Jane away from the desert, from the marking in the sand, just as the S.H.I.E.L.D. cars arrive. Her thoughts linger there. Her mouth is still warm from his.

*

“You’re not going to wait for him, are you?” Eric asks as they stand outside the remains of her lab. Agents buzz around them. It’s a cloudy day, the sun weak, but they have their sunglasses on nevertheless. The black car idles behind Eric, waiting to take him to his meetings with S.H.I.E.L.D.

Jane wants to ask all these questions of why, and why not her, and what does it mean for Thor, but she holds her tongue for the first time she can remember. She’s getting her life’s work back; that’s all that matters.

 _(Except for maybe it isn’t everything any longer. It’s just the key to everything.)_

“No,” she murmurs, brushing her hair back from her face. “I’m not going to sit and wait.”

“Because he may never—“

“He promised,” she cuts in, her fingers curling into the cuffs of her flannel shirt. “He promised, and I believe him.”

Eric stares at her very carefully. “That’s not all that logical.”

Jane smiles then, a faint curl of her mouth. “Logic isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I’ve found.”

*

Jane goes back to the marks in the desert every day for a week.

It isn’t pining. It’s not lost time.

Agent Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. take their sweet time getting her equipment back to her, despite being so close. S.H.I.E.L.D. has to bring in crews to fix up the destruction left by the Asgardians during battle. There’s nothing for her to do until her facilities are restored and her equipment comes home. She gives Darcy the week off; the girl gives her space but doesn’t leave, but that’s her choice. Jane’s secretly pleased. She likes coming back to the trailer and seeing the lights on one trailer down. It makes her feel a little less lost.

But she needs the space and the air, to breathe through the chaos Thor left in her heart. The day after he left, just hours after Eric leaves with Coulson, she gets into the van and just drives. She drives past the town’s outskirts and out into the broad pale expanse of desert, pushing through dust clouds and patches of sunlight. When she brakes slowly at the edges of the marking, scorched earth marking the paths of destruction from just a day ago, she’s not surprised.

She goes back every day, after that.

Sometimes, she sits in the van, her notebook open across the steering wheel, and she sketches the arc of light from the sky, numbers and parabolas arching across the paper from her pen. Her fingers turn pages one by one, but she always goes back to the sketch in Thor’s hand, of the nine realms. His lines are thick and rudimentary, childlike and lovely. She goes over and over the page with her fingertips, until they are dark and smudged from the pencil.

When she sits in the van too long, she can smell him in the air. It’s ozone and thunder and something sweet; she imagines Asgard that way, and wonders if she will ever really know.

It’s then that she gets out of the car, and walks.

*

Other days, she walks circuits along the imprint in the desert ground, sketching the intricate lines and markings. The clouds have dispersed, leaving clear skies and not a sign of thunder. She thinks she might grow to hate blue skies, after all this.

There’s a thickness on her tongue, a name she longs to try. She remembers watching him circle this place, his warriors at his side, calling into the skies.

 _(She also remembers a warm mouth on hers, his arm unyielding at the small of her back, and the wind in her hair, cool and swift as he presses her through the desert air. She had flown, and he had helped her—)_

The wind picks up, brushing her hair across her throat and cheeks. She tucks into her flannel shirt and stops for a moment, glancing up into the sky. “Heimdall,” she tests out on her tongue, her voice lost in the vast expanse of the desert.

The name, foreign at her lips, carries away on the breeze. The bridgekeeper, the guardian of the Bifrost; the strangeness of Thor’s world is no different than the words and terms of science, of hers. She trusts in him, trusts in that just as she has faith in the energy markings and measurements in her notebooks.

There’s no answer, of course. She doesn’t expect it. It’s unrealistic, unsupported by the years of her science and her work. Still, she wets her lips and squints into the too-blue sky. “Heimdall,” she repeats, just a little bit louder.

Waiting for a moment, she sets her notebook and pencil down, passing a hand through her hair. “I feel stupid,” she mutters to herself, sighing.

A cold breeze curls around her ankles. There’s sand underneath her fingernails. She toes at the desert floor with her sneakers. “I’m going to fix it,” she says into the empty dry air. “I think that if he isn’t here, he couldn’t get back. So, I’ll fix it. Whatever it was, I can fix it. Deal?”

An eerie silence envelops her. She presses her hands into her stomach, a warmth curling there. Her hair sticks to her throat with the wind. Sometimes she feels as if she’s part of the desert now, part of the sand; she thinks she might crumble in the breeze.

“Deal,” she murmurs, more for herself than anyone.

*

“Eric told me that it took you a year to say yes to Donald,” Darcy says as they lug the equipment back into the restored lab, case by case. The derision in her voice over Donald’s name is amusing.

Jane grunts, setting her computer on the stainless steel desk. S.H.I.E.L.D. graciously updated their working materials; as a thank you, or as an impetus for working more quickly, she’s not sure. She’s just happy to have her life back. “So what?” she asks, straightening and wiping her forehead with her sleeve.

Darcy wrinkles her nose, setting her box down at her feet. “So it takes you a year to go out with a guy once, but in less than a week, you’re in love with a Pop Tart-loving coffee-snorting strongman?”

Tucking loose strands of hair into her ponytail, Jane sighs. Color flushes up her throat towards her cheeks, her fingers curling into the sleeves of her shirt. New Mexico is colder than you’d think in late fall. _Thor was always warm, always—_

“There are some things even I can’t explain,” Jane says finally.

“Can I at least ask what did it for you?” Darcy pleads.

“No,” Jane says, biting back a smile.

Darcy plucks at her glasses, the dark frames stark against her pale face. “Can I pick a song for you guys?”

Jane’s mouth curls, a strange lightness in her chest. “Sure.”

Grinning, Darcy turns and flounces back towards the boxes littering the front of their facilities. S.H.I.E.LD agents now reside in town, to keep an eye out for them (and on them; Jane’s not a stupid woman). If Jane squints, she can see them across the street, looking out through the freshly-paned glass windows. “You’d think they’d give us a hand with these,” Darcy mutters.

“We don’t need their help,” Jane says fiercely, beginning to open her boxes. She slides her fingers gently over the equipment, over her pride and joy.

Thor had been right; he had gotten them back for her.

Now, she would get him back, too.

*

When Eric returns, the lab is set up and ready. Jane has her calculations and her computers and Darcy and her notebook, and she is sharp and ready for work. They don’t speak of Thor, of anything personal; there is research to finish, and a bridge to rebuild.

But in her inside coat pocket, there is a map of nine realms, the universes sketched out in rough pencil and a childlike hand. She keeps it close to her heart, and remembers that a deal is a deal.

*


End file.
